WITH THE FRENCH ARMY

Otago Witness, Issue 3244, 17 May 1916, Page 30

WITH THE FRENCH ARMY

OUR FALSE TRADITIONS. GREAT DEFENSIVE FIGHTERS. (From H. S. GtTLLETT, Official Australian Correspondent with the French Army.) New Zealand rights secured by the Otasro Daily Times. PARIS. The French Army is as impressive to an Englishman as the British Navy is to a Frenchman. The French excel on the land as \ve do on the water. The accidental defeat of 1870, when there was a temporary failure of French leadership, has been foolishly accepted as a failure of the French soldier, and as marking the deterioration of the whole people. Capably led, as he has been in this war, the French soldier to-day has no superior in the world, and, measured in million, a no equal. The army, you see it, is a marvel of strength and efficiency. This war is the destroyer of cheap and false traditions, and, among others that must be abandoned, is the tradition that the French were not defensive fighters. The truth is that their offensive qualities are so magnificent that we have been wont to deny them any defensive merits at all. The Frenchman has been rather proud of the charge; he so loves the assault, and excels in it, that he has been somewhat contemptuous about the great negative qualities of war. In England last year it was generally thought that the French might soon grow tired of the struggle, because of the necessity for so much sitting still, and the abserjee of opportunity for sustained and profitable aggression. Our ignorance of the fighting legions of the Republic was almost tragic. WHAT THE FRENCH HAVE DONE. Think what the Ffench have done ! As .you move among these gallant troops you blush for your old doubts and fears about the people and the soldiers of France, and your mind is carried back to the most glorious pages of the nation's military history. Almost single-handed she stopped the German hosts, and stopped them without trenches, fighting strategy against strategy, and man against man—or one man to two—in the open, as in the battles of the past. Then, their sons manned 500 miles of trenches, as against some 25 or 30 miles held at that time by the British, and, fighting on the defensive, resisted every effort of the German hosts to break through. It was the popular belief in England in those days that the Germans had a special desire to break through the British line and annihilate our "despicable little army." But commonsense tells us that the concern of the Germans was to break the western front at its weakest point. Had there been any weak spots in the long French front, it was there that the enemy would have concentrated his attack, and we know that he did attack the French at 50 different places. It cannot bo too often repeated that, had the Germans defeated the French in their first great onrush, and put the Republic out of action, the war must have been practically over. England might have kept up the blockade for 20 years, but she coukl never have hoped to conquer the Germans on land. The downfall of France would have been inevitably followed by the smashing of the Russian arms; You realise on this long battlefield that the menace _ of successful militarism was never as serious as it is to-day. Had Germany conquered France and Russia, she could have polic d those countries with a few thousand troops. All she had to do was to ensure that they could not manufacture machine guns and artillery and munitions, and they were powerless. The truth is, if we are in the least generous, that we must admit that France practically saved herself, and, at the same time, saved Europe. Her debt to the British Navy is very great—much greater than to the little Expeditionary Force. If we recall that Germany invaded the Republic with 2i millions of men. and that the British Expeditionary Force did not reach 100.000, we are compelled to _ give France her clue. A strong France is almost as important for England's safety against Germanv as a strong navy. SOLID METHODICAL QUALITIES. The French on the defensive have proved themselves possessed to a surprising degree of those solid methodical qualities which we liked to believe were the popular attribute of the British. The thoroughness of the French defences are positively depressing. You find it hard to believe that an army which looked for an advance within the near future would have expended so much design and hard labour and money upon the lino of trenches which it at present occupies. On the British front you get the idea that wo have been perhaps a little too optimistic; that we honed each week would be our last on the ground now occupied, and that soon we should be occupying positions further east. In the French fines you are almost led to think that the people of the Republic are reconciled to a new and fixed frontier. Their trenches have not only a sense of complete security so far as the German offensive is concerned, but also an atmosphere of homely comfort. One mind seems to have designed and executed the whol" system just as one exalted impulse dictates the supreme sacrifice, if need be, for its defence. When you observe the thoroughness and duplication of the French defences, there is borne in upon you a deeper conception of what wo have to overcome on the German side before we reach that victory towards which avo are striving, and which, on this front at least, we are surely attaining. Because we know from the German trenches already captured by the Allies that the enemy too excel at the defensive, although such a confession means the overturning of much popular m'sconeeption in England at the commencement of the war. when it was IHioved that the Gormnn machine would Fail if it could not constantly go forward. But in the French and German lines to-day there is this d'AVvnee—the French have during the war enormously increased the : r man power, while their artillery and machine guns are mnltipl : ed from month to month nr>d th"ir imiTiitinrmvmf is now ample for every need: the Germans, as we have the bet of r --sons for believing, are diminish : ng every day in man nowor. and no longer increase as tliev did in guns and munitionment. Already the advantage is wilh th" French and the British, ami :n----creasinrrly so; in the course of time this advantage will become sufficiently overwhelming to make progress pract*cable, and then war will be over. The French laugh if you tell them that their lines have an

atmosphere of permanence. They are as confident of travelling east as the British, but they are, perhaps, a little more careful of the lives of their soldiers than we are —a little less sporting when it comes to vital tilings—and so they have excelled with engineering and navvying just as they have with their artillery and infantry. EXTBAORDINA U Y DC PLICATION. At one. parr, of the French lino which we visited a general told us that the total length of the trendies, including reserve trenches and communications, on a front of 17 kilometres, made up no ks 3 than 400 kilometres. The actual front line was multiplied 23 times! All of tin's trenching would be of usual depth; in .addition there would be numberless great dug-outs, or rather caves, and machine gun emplacements, perhaps a few redoubts and scores of fortified houses and posts. A single French redoubt would before the war have brought curious travellers from all over the world to marvel at the resourcefulness displayed in its creation; at its apparent maze, and yet its perfect system. We went down many steps far into the darkness, with boarded floor" and timbered sides and ceiling, pnssed along a gallery for perhaps 50 yards, and then ascended into the open of a little square village churchyard, surrounded bv an old stone wall some 3ft thick and "Bft high. We were well behind the front line, but here, with its galleries and walls and trenches, and its communication with the shattered village alongside, a force might have survived for days, possibly even weeks, after the front trenches had been carried! Thousands of troops might stream past on either side of the redoubt, but. so .Jong as it stands, and can work a few machine eruns, Jhe doom of the enemy is certain. These islands have a hundred times stood unmoved amidst the wild flood of the invaders, and by their crossfire ha.ve first arrested and then reduced the pnomv battalions to chaos. Their strength being underground, they are proof against days of shelling by the heaviest of artillery, and when they are reduced it is by hand-to-hand _ fighting of the most terrible and bloodiest nature, which takes place with bomb and bayonet and fist and fingers and teeth, in dark underground passages. The one of which I write was a typical French countryside cemetery in war time. Here and there a shell had violently uprooted the resting places of generations of villagers; new crosses stood above soldiers' craves, which, although within a few hundred yards of the enemy lines, were fragrant with fresh flowers. I noticed the grave of a young German airman, and remarked to an officer (bit it bore its cross and wns carefully tended. "There is still some chivalry left." I suggested. "Yes." he replied, not without bitterness, "but only between the flying men. The German aviators appear to hare escaped kultur. We care for their dead, and we know they do for ours." Tt is well that this should be so, for, when the heroin airman falls, dend or •"-•ounded, he falls nearly always among his foe 1? A SINISTER FINE FOREST. We climbed a steep lull, densely covered with a pine forest extending over thousands of acres. Our mission wa3 a visit to formidable batteries oi heavy guns, and, as we followed a winding, unmade footpath through the pines, wo wondered how the great guns were ever got into position. There were numbers of monster guns, and the hill was occupied by hundreds of men; but, so skilful was the concealment, that you might have passed over it many times and seen nothing more than an occasional soldier. At a shout from the officer, eager artillerymen leapt like goblins from holes about the roots of the gloomy pines and sported maliciously round the guns. Touches from deft fingers, and evil muzzles raised themselves slowly but surely, for the top oi the hill was between them and the enemy. Words of command rang out strangely in the stillness of the peaceful forest; a thunderous crash; a pause for a minute, as it seemed, and then came the dull boom of the shell as it burst, miles away, in the country of the enemy. The officer spoke again; the men went back to their caves, and silence fell anions the pines. So operates the decisive machinery in the war. AN OBSERVATION POST. As wc climbed up towards an observation post we passed a jagged hole in the turf which suggested that some huge, hellish iron hand had reached down and clutched earth and rock and roots at random. Our guide smiled. "'So far," he eaid, "they have not succeeded in finding us, although they are always shooting." We had glimpses of telephone wires and wireless installations and boxes of keen carrier pigeons. The telephones are sufficient communication between the observers and their batteries upon peaceful days like this, but should an attack come with it 3 hurricane of shells destroying even the underground telephones and wireless stations, the pigeons might mean the saving or the carry:ng of a position. Should the pigeons be destroyed there are still the old-fashioned signallers and runners, and after them detailed prearranged time-tables. And yet despite all this wo know that in nearly every serious attack on trenches in the war, artillery and infantry have sooner or later lost their connection. That is the commonest cause of chaos and failure. DIRECTING THE GUNS. Our hill ends in a sheer drop of somo hundreds of feet down to a wide flooded river valley, in which are the opposing trenches. We peer down the chalky network showing white against the dark wet surface soil, and it is apparently so hopeless in design and rude in execution that it might have been the achievement of two races of drunken supermen fiercely working in the darkness. (An acrid photograph of trenches looks Ike the result of some competitive blindfold drawing game at a children's party). We observe irom the shelter of trees and barriers of branches renewed from night to night to enure that the encmv shall not get the information from failing leaves. Then 100 yards to the rear, in a dense part of the forest, we proceed to sec the invariable alternative. We dip into a hollow in the ground and pass along a dry timber, d passage in which we can comfortably walk erect, and descend sharply. Soon each member of the party : s standing in a little cave to himself, far down the side of the bluff, and looking through narrow horizontal slits at leisure and in safety over the field of conflict. From there the military observers can see with precision the bursting of every shell flung from tho great blind guns behind the hill.